I was on another forum today and a guy was complaining about the bottle deposit in Oregon. He had issues with the fact that non-carbonated beverages don't count, with cross-border returns and whether it actually helped remove litter. His main angle was that poor people can buy pop with food stamps and then take the cans back for something like a 15-20% conversion back to cash.

I replied that the real fat cats are in the beverage industry because they keep all the excess deposits. Is that still the case? I remember a story about how the state wanted some of those dimes, but I don't know how it was resolved. What happens to bottle deposits that don't get refunded?